The masculine mistake

By Patrick Blanchfield

|NEW YORK DAILY NEWS|

Nov 16, 2014 | 5:00 AM

What is so broken inside American men? Why do we make so many spaces unsafe for women? Why do we demand that they smile as we harass them - and why, when women bring the reality of their everyday experiences into the open, do we threaten to kill them for it? (Drew Dzwonkowski / New York Daily News)

What is so broken inside American men? Why do we make so many spaces unsafe for women? Why do we demand that they smile as we harass them - and why, when women bring the reality of their everyday experiences into the open, do we threaten to kill them for it?

If you're a man reading this, you likely feel defensive by now. I'm not one of those guys, you might be telling yourself. Not all men are like that. But actually, what if they are? And what if men like you telling yourselves that you're not part of the problem is itself part of the problem?

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We've all seen the video by now. "Smile," says the man, uncomfortably close. And then, more angrily, "Smile!"

An actress, Shoshana Roberts, spends a day walking through New York streets, surreptitiously recorded by a camera. Dozens of men accost her; they comment on her appearance and demand that she respond to their "compliments."

Produced for the anti-harassment group Hollaback! by filmmaker Robert Bliss, the video illustrates a basic fact: If you're a woman, heading to work or running an errand isn't just walking down the street - it's running a gauntlet.

Although the video did provoke soul-searching among some male viewers following its release last month, the producers and the actress received death threats almost immediately after the clip went online.

Think about that for a second. A woman makes it impossible for men not see a truth that usually remains invisible to them: that men make our streets into threatening spaces. And in response, men threaten to kill her.

Women don't just get threatened for exposing what they face in our streets, but also in our schools. Here in New York, one Columbia senior, Emma Sulkowicz, is carrying her dorm room mattress with her everywhere she goes. She will continue to do so until her alleged rapist is no longer on campus.

Trying to accomplish what?

Her work, at once an act of protest and a piece of performance art entitled "Carry that Weight," has attracted widespread attention to a national problem: No fewer than 85 colleges and universities are under federal investigation for allegedly violating anti-discrimination laws in their handling of sexual assault claims.

Although 19% of women who attend college report being sexually assaulted there, university administrations seem more inclined to avoid legal liability than to hold perpetrators accountable.

The stand Sulkowicz is taking has inspired many. But there's also been a predictable backlash. Columbia has retaliated against students who dared to call public attention to its sexual assault problem by charging them for "cleanup costs" after they participated in a day of protest late last month.

And when the editors of the Columbia student newspaper, The Spectator, published an op-ed by Sulkowicz, they had to shut down the comments section in anticipation of a tidal wave of misogynistic abuse.

Much as these women have experienced threats when they expose the realities of what they face on our streets and campuses, so do women who expose what happens in the virtual world. Last month, Anita Sarkeesian, a critic of misogyny in videogames, was forced to cancel an appearance at Utah State University after being threatened with "the deadliest school shooting in American history" targeting her and other "feminists." Sarkeesian's analysis is on-point - as Catherine Buni and Soraya Chemaly report, when surveyed, "70% of female gamers [said they] chose to play as male characters rather than contend with sexual harassment."

By publicly calling attention to this situation - old news to female gamers- Sarkeesian has become one of the latest targets of an ongoing "movement" known as #GamerGate, a loose association of largely male gamers who have launched an onslaught of terrifying threats of violence against individual women in the video games industry.

Sarkeesian herself had to cancel her Utah appearance after learning that police were legally blocked from preventing licensed gun owners from bringing sidearms to her lecture - even after someone specifically told her they were going to come to her event to assassinate her. And despite that, immediately after her cancellation, men mocked her decision as "hysterical."

Anita Sarkeesian (Feminist Frequency via Twitter)

There's a clear pattern here, and it's shameful. Women come forward with a basic message: that their experience in a given space - a street, a campus, a dorm room, the virtual worlds of games or social media - is toxic, threatening. When these women make the reality of what they face impossible to deny, men descend upon them in a fury - enacting the very behaviors they claim women are simply imagining.

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And these men want not just to silence individual women when they speak out, but to erase the very notion of speaking as a woman or as a feminist in the first place. When Time Magazine absurdly included "feminist" on a poll of words to be "banned" for 2015, male internet trolls flooded the ballots to put the term at the top of the list.

Why do men do this? How can men walk down the same streets as women, attend the same schools, play the same games, live in the same homes, be part of the same families - yet either not realize or not care how hellish we make women's lives?

One possible answer: Straight American masculinity is fundamentally broken. Our culture socializes young men to believe that they are entitled to sexual attention from women, and that women go about their lives with that as their primary purpose - as opposed to just being other people, with their own plans, priorities and desires.

We teach men to see women as objects, not other human beings. Their bodies are things men are entitled to: to judge, to assess, and to dispose of - in other words, to treat as pornographic playthings, to have access to and, if the women resist, to threaten, to destroy.

We raise young boys to believe that if they are not successful at receiving sexual attention from women, then they are failures as men. Bullying is merciless in our culture, and is heaped upon geeky boys by other young men in particular (and all the more so against boys who do not appear straight).

But because young men are taught to despise vulnerability, in themselves and in others, they instead turn that hatred upon those who are already more vulnerable - women and others - with added intensity. Put differently, and without in any way excusing their monstrous behavior, young men are given unrealistic expectations, taught to hate themselves when reality falls short - and then to blame women for the whole thing.

Elliot Rodger (YouTube)

And thus we have #GamerGate critics of Sarkeesian claiming to be the "real victims" of prejudice in the same breath as they threaten to rape to death a woman who challenges them. And thus we also hear, in a plea by one of Shoshana Roberts' street harasser, "Somebody's acknowledging you!," a pathetic, aggrieved cry for her acknowledgement of him.

But that plea is still a threat, and women hear it for what it is - because in America, men act out their own brokenness by breaking other people. This May, a young man named Elliot Rodger went on a rampage in Isla Vista, California. His initial plan was to kill as many women as possible, to "slaughter" an entire sorority.

Why? Because whether they were refusing to sleep with him or not returning his smiles in the street, women weren't giving Rodger the sexual attention he felt he was owed. "I am an intelligent gentleman," he wrote, "And I deserve the love of girls more than the other obnoxious boys of my age, and yet they get girls and I don't. That is a crime that can never be forgotten, nor can it be forgiven."

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So Rodger acquired three handguns, three hundred-odd rounds of ammunition, and went on a shooting spree, ultimately killing six people and finally himself.

This is the kernel of young American masculinity at its most horrifically warped: misogynistic and narcissistic and murderous and self-loathing all at once. Men are taught to despise and exploit vulnerability in others, and in women in particular, and accordingly to dominate spaces public and private, virtual and real. But now more than ever, they are being forced to acknowledge that different people are vulnerable in different spaces in different ways - from the virtual world of social media to our campuses to the streets of Manhattan to the suburbs of St. Louis - and to confront the fact that it's men who are collectively responsible for this, one way or another.

In a culture where men are supposed to be all about "fixing things" rather than just "talking about them," the real question is: Are we capable of carrying this weight, of talking honestly about it, and fixing ourselves?

Blanchfield is a doctoral candidate and Woodruff Scholar in Comparative Literature at Emory University and a graduate of the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute.